We got the chance to check out the Closed Beta of Zombies Monsters Robots, the exciting new third person free to play shooter MMO published by En Masse and developed by YingPei Games, The game itself is known by many titles depending on your region but ZMR is for the North American audience.
The premise of the game is tooling up your mercenary character with a variety of different gear, costumes and weapons and facing off against some supernatural terrors, mythological enemies, deadly machines and genetically enhanced super soldiers. The game features a nice contrast of both PVE and PVP, utilising both classic and original game modes to give players in exciting choice of activities.
With our initial foray into the game we had a quick look over character customisation, not a feature that is particularly important with these types of games as it lacks the MMORPG community values and need for such individual character identities, however it was a worthwhile touch albeit simplistic in execution. Switching between a number of different hairstyles, faces and some cosmetic clothing items we quickly churned out our female mercenary and after quickly burning through the tutorial is that children’s how the game works we were ready for jumping into our first PVE scenario campaign.
We have the option of creating our own but instead thought we would check out playing cooperatively with another player, as it happens one player had already started playing and we were able to step into the game with them. New players don’t get to instantly jump into the game and must wait until the active players reach the next checkpoint before they appear. The player was already halfway through stage 1 before we got to jump on, this scenario that will lead us through a huge facility against some psychotic super soldiers. Combat is relatively simple, even on normal mode it didn’t seem to challenging but grew more difficult as the stages progressed, the one thing that does take a little getting used to his how many actions are on the space bar button alone as it is used to run, dodge/roll and take cover/press up against walls so we found that whilst trying to run away from enemies in a corridor as often as not which simply hug the wall and get shot to pieces.
A few levels in the player asked me if they could have the last kill on the big boss as that was the only reason they were doing the mission, which I was fine with, and so we got to the big finale against a huge stationary robot that threw all manner of weapons as us once it reached the end of its final health bar we took a timeout and let our companion take the final shot for a job well done. Seemingly upon doing this they had to do it another seven times to attain the achievement/quest reward that they were after as the game dishes out a number of missions that players can perform to gain items, XP and currency. The battle didn’t stop there and we still had to escape and it was at this point we managed to take a dirt nap as we were overwhelmed by mobs, fortunately we’ve been lucky enough to come across some resurrection tokens in the in game shop before starting the scenario and so were able to jump back into battle and managed to complete the full scenario.
From here we checked out some quick PVP including a free for all every man for themselves game in Area 51, a dusty desert facility that restricted your viewing distance so it was hard to make out players, but unfortunately we only managed to get a few kills before the game finished. From here we tried out the team death match game where the first team to reach 60 kills is the winner’s and whilst it was fun it was here that we felt the most floors showed, primarily with the overpowered nature of the sniper who could take position at the other end of the map and was have full viewing distance to the enemies combined with the ability to see around corners without showing yourself jute the third person camera angle meant that it is too easy for players to know an enemy was coming whereas the enemy will be completely unaware due to the camera angle.
When all is said and done the game is extremely fun, both PVP and the PVE modes and definitely worth checking out when it goes fully free to play with its official launch.
If you want to know more about this game, click on the "info" button below.
